"Thou shalt not extinguish thine anger, but shall master it,
that thy conscience may not be blunted by adjustment
to wrong causes."-The Dutch Ten Commandments to Foil the Nazis

16.6.04

LINK: I'm not going to accuse Andrew Sullivan of going wobbly, but this is ridiculous:

"Maybe in a decade or so, we'll see the real fruits of this noble, flawed experiment."

Simple question, yo: can you name any country that's gone from authoritarian government to perfectly functional republican government in 10 years*? I think I projected a reasonable amount of time to wait and see at 50 years.

For a man who got a degree in government from Harvard (in theory, no less), his politics seem to be more slapdash than most.

*the only three things that strike me as even possible exceptions are the U.S., India and South Africa (from apartheid out), but I think you can argue that each of those didn't emerge from an authoritarian state in the sort of lawless quasi-totalitarian way we mean it with Iraq (that is, each was accomplished by people acting within their laws and morality and merely seeking a fuller, truer expression of them).